[Illustration: 192]
LOUISON and Frédéric are off to school along the village street. The
sun shines gaily and the two children are singing. They sing like the
nightingale, because their hearts are light like his. They sing an old
song their grandmothers sang when they were little girls, a song their
children’s children will sing one day; for songs are tender flowers that
never die, they fly from lip to lip down the ages. The lips fade and
fall silent one after the other, but the song lives on for ever. There
are songs come down to us from the days when the men were shepherds
and all the women shepherdesses. That is the reason why they speak of
nothing but sheep and wolves.
Louison and Frédéric sing; their mouths are as round as a flower and the
song rises shrill and thin and clear in the morning air.
But listen! suddenly the notes stick in Frederic’s throat.
What unseen power is it has strangled the music on the boy’s lips? It is
fear. Every day, as sure as fate, he comes upon the butcher’s dog at the
end of the village street, and every day his heart seems to stop and his
legs begin to shake at the sight. Yet the butcher’s dog does not fly at
him, or even threaten to. He sits peaceably at his master’s shop-door.
But he is black, and he has a staring bloodshot eye and shows a row of
sharp white teeth. He looks frightful. And then he squats there in the
middle of bits of meat and offal and all sorts of horrors--which makes
him more terrifying still. Of course it is n’t his fault, but he is
the presiding genius. Yes, a savage brute, the butcher’s dog! So, the
instant Frédéric catches sight of the beast before the shop, he picks up
a big stone, as he sees grown-up men do to keep off bad-tempered curs,
and he slinks past close, close under the opposite wall.
That is how he behaved this time; and Louison laughed at him.
She did not make any of those daredevil speeches one generally caps with
others more reckless still. No, she never said a word; she never stopped
singing. But she altered her voice and began singing on such a mocking
note that Frédéric reddened to his very ears. Then his little head began
to buzz with many thoughts. He learned that we must dread shame even
more than danger. And he was afraid of being afraid.
So, when school was over and he saw the butcher’s dog, he marched
undauntedly past the astonished animal.
History adds that he kept a corner of his eye on Louison to see if
she was looking. It is a true saying that, if there were no dames nor
damsels in the world, men would be less courageous.